Cronbach’s Alpha, My Favourite Statistic

Is it strange that I have a favourite statistic? Is it strange that as part of every hiring interview I ask the person what THEIR favourite statistic is? (Warning to all of you who may suffer through one of my future interviews.)
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My favourite statistic is cronbach’s alpha. I like seeing the item-total correlations, popping variables in and out of exploratory testing, and crossing my fingers that my final decision gives me a value greater than 0.8, with both positively and negatively keyed items from the full range of categories and with as few items as possible. Yikes. That sounds impossible. But I’ll always try.

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I'm a market research methodologist who blogs about sampling, surveys, statistics, charts, and more. I also like to live blog conferences I speak at. My goal is to keep research real, current, and fun. I approve and post every single comment that makes it through my spam filter, usually within 24 hours.